Rebecca

Since I've already written about Gone With the Wind, which won the 1939 Best Picture award, I'll skip on to 1940, when producer David O. Selznick won his second consecutive Best Picture, after bringing to Hollywood a British director by the name of Alfred Hitchcock. The film was Rebecca, based on a best-selling novel by Daphne du Maurier.

The film, as well as the book, is a Gothic romance. A pretty but mousy young woman, Joan Fontaine (whose name is never revealed in the film) is working as a paid companion to a vulgar American battle-axe vacationing in Monte Carlo. She meets the handsome and mysterious Maxim DeWinter (Laurence Olivier) and they have a whirlwind romance. They marry and he takes her back to his Cornwall estate, Manderley. There, she realizes she is competing with the ghost of his first wife, Rebecca.

Though I use the word ghost, Rebecca is not a poltergeist in the haunted house tradition. Instead she is a presence of memory, particularly embodied in the mind of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper from Hell, played evilly by Judith Anderson. Danvers resents the new Mrs. DeWinter immediately, and does everything she can to make her life miserable. In one memorable scene, after engineering Fontaine's humiliation at a costume ball, she almost induces her to jump out the window to her death.

This pseudo-ghost story turns toward the end of the picture into something of a murder mystery, as the circumstances of Rebecca's death, and her true character, come under scrutiny. It's a bit of jarring swerve, and the nuts and bolts of how Rebecca's boat sank sort of scramble the eeriness of the first two-thirds of the picture. However, this section also contains a delicious performance by George Sanders, who was Rebecca's favorite cousin and, it seems, so much more than that.

Selznick brought Hitchcock to Hollywood for this project, and it wasn't exactly a smooth marriage. Of course Hitchcock was famous for in-camera cutting, and Selznick well known for his lengthy memos on production details (twenty years later Hitchcock mentioned that he finally finished reading one of Selznick's memos). The script was as faithful to du Maurier's novel as the production code would allow, as the book had a murderer getting of scot-free, which was a no-no in Hollywood films. There is also more than a hint of a lesbian relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca.

The film is a good one, but in retrospect it is not among Hitchcock's greatest, but it is the only film of his to win Best Picture. He did not win Best Director, that prize going instead to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath (which really deserved to win the top honor as well). Of course, Hitchcock never would win a Best Director Oscar, having to settle for a honorary award late in life (for which his entire acceptance speech can be quoted here: "Thank you.") Also noteworthy are the cinematography by George Barnes, which did win an Oscar, and employs masterly use of light and shadow, and the spooky music by Franz Waxman.